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No I Will Not ‘Become A Fan’

Pro­bably like you, I own a small busi­ness. Who doesn’t these days right? Also like you, and ever­yone else that owns a com­pu­ter, I’m on Face­book. And just like ever­yone else on Face­book, I get inun­da­ted with “Become a Fan” requests at least 6–8 times a week. These requests are gene­rally for fan pages of small busi­nes­ses, either that friends of mine own, or friends of a friend of mine own.

Now, let me be honest, I think my small busi­ness is AWESOME. But I also rea­lize, that unless I’m giving you money, or you’re a client of mine, you really have no rea­son to “become my fan” on Face­book. It’s great that we’re friends and all, but I don’t expect anyone outside of my industry, or who I do work with, to find anything that I do pro­fes­sio­nally, exci­ting or worthy of fandom.

It reminds me of Eddie Murphy: “What have you done for me lately?” — I espe­cially don’t want to become a fan of busi­ness pages who’s busi­ness I don’t even use, read, or know about! I can’t endorse something that I don’t use. That doesn’t mean we’re not friends, or that I don’t like you, it just makes sense.

I know that ever­yone out there by now has heard that this social media thing is all the hype, but sig­ning up for a Twit­ter account and crea­ting a fan page for your busi­ness on Face­book doesn’t mean that you’re “doing it”.

If you’re a small busi­ness and trying to kill it with social media, you need to think about what you’re pro­vi­ding your users. Most peo­ple aren’t going to like you just because you’re you, even though you’re won­der­ful. Try a few of these things:

Create some face-melting content

Give away stuff, peo­ple love that

Run a con­test that users might actually have a chance at winning

Res­pond to your users

Don’t go mis­sing, if you’re not if front of your audience, someone else will be

Rather than just put­ting up a fan page with links to your site, put your back into it and do something valua­ble for your users. Then you might actually have something worthy of beco­ming a fan of. Don’t expect to sign up for a cou­ple of accounts on the most popu­lar social net­works and thing that everything is going to work out for you. Peo­ple now more than ever are loo­king for rea­sons to not pay atten­tion to you. Bet­ween all of the media chan­nels, Face­book games, Twit­ter, You­Tube sur­fing and the like, there is more than enough dis­trac­tion in our lives — we don’t need another vani­lla ins­tall fan page to be a part of that will spam our inbox with noti­fi­ca­tions that we really don’t care about.

What does work are the brands and busi­nes­ses that go out and do all of these bullet points to the max, and then some. Think about the web­si­tes that you repea­tedly visit, even when they don’t notify you that there’s something new to see. What are they doing that you’re not?